There exist literary histories of probability and scientific histories
of probability, but it has generally been thought that the two did not
meet. Campe begs to differ. Mathematical probability, he argues, took
over the role of the old probability of poets, orators, and logicians,
albeit in scientific terms. Indeed, mathematical probability would not
even have been possible without the other probability, whose roots lay
in classical antiquity. The Game of Probability revisits the
seventeenth and eighteenth-century "probabilistic revolution,"
providing a history of the relations between mathematical and
rhetorical techniques, between the scientific and the aesthetic. This
was a revolution that overthrew the "order of things," notably the way
that science and art positioned themselves with respect to reality,
and its participants included a wide variety of people from as many
walks of life. Campe devotes chapters to them in turn. Focusing on the
interpretation of games of chance as the model for probability and on
the reinterpretation of aesthetic form as verisimilitude (a critical
question for theoreticians of that new literary genre, the novel), the
scope alone of Campe's book argues for probability's crucial role in
the constitution of modernity.
Les mer
Literature and Calculation from Pascal to Kleist
Produktdetaljer
ISBN
9780804784665
Publisert
2017
Utgave
1. utgave
Utgiver
Stanford University Press
Språk
Product language
Engelsk
Format
Product format
Digital bok
Forfatter